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The Role of a Society Journal in a Changing Environment

The 75th Anniversary Issue of College & Research Libraries has just been released online. C&RL’s editor, Scott Walter, has lovingly featured a selection of classic and impactful articles from the journal’s history, revisited by some of today’s leading experts on academic librarianship.

I was asked to take on a slightly different task, to reflect in a closing piece about the role of a professional society’s journal in a changing environment for our scholarly communications. C&RL is already open access and online-only, so it has the opportunity to think through a next set of questions about what audience it is seeking to reach, whether to find ways to serve a greater share of member-authors, and whether to publish formats beyond article-length textual pieces. Another community need, which I hope some entity if not C&RL will step forward to meet, is to keep our community more systematically apprised of the latest developments that could be relevant to its professional practices, which requires that we strengthen our journalistic coverage. I hope that “Scholarly Societies and Scholarly Communication: A Look Ahead” makes a useful contribution to members’ ongoing thinking about their scholarly communications needs and those of our broader community.

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Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit service that helps the academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, technological, and demographic change. We deliver strategic guidance, research, and publications through two program areas: Educational Transformation and Libraries & Scholarly Communication.